Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Study finds psychedelics benefit cancer patients

Nicky Edlich underwent a psychedelic experience as part of a drug study at New York University.  (Associated Press)
Malcolm Ritter Associated Press

NEW YORK – The big white pill was brought to her in an earthenware chalice. She’d already held hands with her two therapists and expressed her wishes for what it would help her do.

She swallowed it, lay on the couch with her eyes covered, and waited. And then it came.

“The world was made up of jewels and I was in a dome,” she recalled. Surrounded by brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors, she saw the dome open up to admit “this most incredible luminescence that made everything even more beautiful.”

That’s how Nicky Edlich, 67, began her first trip on a psychedelic drug last year. She says it has greatly helped her psychotherapeutic treatment for anxiety from her advanced ovarian cancer.

And for researchers, it was another small step toward showing that hallucinogenic drugs can one day help doctors treat conditions like cancer anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The New York University study Edlich participated in is among a handful now going on in the United States and elsewhere with drugs like LSD, Ecstasy and psilocybin, the main ingredient of “magic mushrooms.” The work follows lines of research choked off four decades ago by the war on drugs. The research is still preliminary.

“There is now more psychedelic research taking place in the world than at any time in the last 40 years,” said Rick Doblin, executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which funds some of the work.

But doing the research is not easy, Doblin and others say, with government funders still leery and drug companies not interested in the compounds they can’t patent. That pretty much leaves private donors.

“There’s still a lot of resistance to it,” said David Nichols, a Purdue University professor of medicinal chemistry and president of the Heffter Institute, which is supporting the NYU study. “The whole hippie thing in the ’60s” and media coverage at the time “has kind of left a bad taste in the mouth of the public at large.

Edlich, whose cancer forced her to retire, had plenty of reason to seek help through the NYU project. Several recurrences of her ovarian cancer had provoked fears about suffering and dying and how her death would affect her family. She felt “profound sadness that my life was going to be cut short.” And she faced existential questions: Why live? What does it all mean? How can I go on?

“These things were in my head and I wanted them to take a back seat to living in the moment,” she said.

Psilocybin has been shown to evoke powerful spiritual experiences during the four to six hours it affects the brain. A study published in 2008, in fact, found that even 14 months after healthy volunteers had taken a single dose, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.

Experts emphasize people shouldn’t try psilocybin on their own because it can be harmful, sometimes causing bouts of anxiety and paranoia.